- find out what hate crimes or hate incidents are.- find out about the ways you can report them.- report using the online form.- find information about people that can help and support you if you have been a victim.

Reporting makes a difference – to you, your friends, and your community. By reporting hate crime when it happens, you can help stop it happening to someone else. You will also help the police to better understand the level of hate crime in your local area, and improve the way they respond to it.

What is a Hate Crime?

Hate crimes are any crimes that are targeted at a person because of hostility or prejudice towards that person’s:

During National Hate Crime Awareness Week 2015 (10th – 17th October), the 4 Welsh Forces and Police and Crime Commissioners are joining together with the Welsh Government and Victim Support in running a range of local and national initiatives to raise awareness about hate crime and to encourage more people to report them. Throughout the week there will be a focus on each type of hate crime – religion, disability, sexual orientation, race and gender identity.

The campaign will be supported by messages from a dedicated Twitter account @HateCrimeCymru which will signpost to information, support and resources throughout the week using the hashtags #ThinkForMyself, #MakeHateHistory, #HCAWCymru15, #HateCrime and #SeeItHearItReportIt

In addition, Victim Support Cymru received funding from the four Police and Crime Commissioners in Wales to run a non-stop Hate Crime Roadshow around Wales this week aimed at informing residents what hate crime is; how they can report it and what support they are able to receive.

“Hate crimes are under reported for a number of reasons. This week we are highlighting what a hate crime is and encouraging people to report hate crimes to us: whether it be verbal abuse, offensive graffiti, threats, damage to property, assault, cyber bullying, abusive texts, emails or phone calls. It is important communities know what we are doing about hate crimes and the support we and our partners can offer.

The 4 Welsh Forces have a zero tolerance approach to hate crime: it can destroy lives; instil fear and break down the fabric of communities and neighbourhoods. Hate crime can affect anyone and, if not tackled, can lead to the isolation and victimisation of individuals and vulnerable groups along with the polarisation of communities. Hate crime can affect anyone and, if not tackled, can lead to the isolation and victimisation of individuals and vulnerable groups along with the polarisation of communities.

This week, we encourage you to follow our social media campaign @HateCrimeCymru and highlight, challenge and report hate crime wherever you see it. To report a hate crime, call 101, 999 or visit http://www.report-it.org.uk”

MP's Call for Hate Crime Offenders to be Banned from Using Computers

Social media users who spread racial hatred should be banned from sites such as Twitter and Facebook, MPs say.

The All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into anti-Semitism wants prosecutors to examine if prevention orders like those used to restrict sex offenders' internet access could be used.

The cross-party group also highlighted the use of anti-Semitic terms online.

Last week, a Community Security Trust report said UK anti-Semitic incidents more than doubled to 1,168 in 2014.

The trust - which monitors anti-Semitism in Britain - says this was its highest figure recorded since it began work in 1984.

'Hate crimes'

The Parliamentary inquiry was set up following a rise in incidents in July and August last year during fighting between Gaza and Israel.

The MPs said social media platforms had "increasingly been used for the spread of anti-Semitism".

Their report said the terms "Hitler" and "Holocaust" were among the top 35 phrases relating to Jews during the conflict.

The hashtags "Hitler" and "genocide" featured with "high frequency", it added. The "Hitler Was Right" hashtag trended worldwide in July 2014.

The report said: "There is an allowance in the law for banning or blocking individuals from certain aspects of internet communication in relation to sexual offences.

"Informal feedback we have received from policy experts indicates that this is a potential area of exploration for prosecutors in relation to hate crime.

"If it can be proven in a detailed way that someone has made a considered and determined view to exploit various online networks to harm and perpetrate hate crimes against others then the accepted principles, rules and restrictions that are relevant to sex offences must surely apply."

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said the report was timely following the recent attacks in Paris

The report also said there was an "unacceptable rise in anti-Semitic incidents" in July and August last year.

It added: "It is for non-Jews to speak out and lead the fight against anti-Semitism with strong action."

It also called for:

A government fund to be set up to cover the costs of security at synagoguesFresh research on identifying and explaining anti-Semitic languageGuidance for teachers on how to handle the Middle East conflict in the classroomThe report also comes weeks after four people were killed at a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

'Zero-tolerance approach'

Prime Minister David Cameron called the report "hugely important", adding that tackling anti-Semitism went "right to the heart of what we stand for as a country".

Community Secretary Eric Pickles added: "We remain staunchly committed to tackling anti-Semitism wherever it occurs and will continue to take a zero-tolerance approach."

And Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis welcomed the timing of the report, which he said came when the "threat against the Jewish community is real and anxiety remains high following recent events".

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said the force had taken steps to provide "additional reassurance" to Jewish communities in recent weeks.

The best way of helping police was to report hate crime, but a wider response was also needed, he said.

"We need society to become as vocally intolerant of faith-hatred as it is of other forms of discrimination, and a clearer understanding of where freedom of speech oversteps the mark."

Meanwhile, a Populus poll accompanying the report also suggested a third of Britons - 37% - believed the problem of anti-Semitism has got worse in the last decade.

In comparison, 16% thought it had got better.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where one means anti-Semitism is not a problem at all and 10 means it is a serious issue, participants rated it at 4.66.

That figure was largely unchanged from when a similar survey was carried out in 2005.

AnalysisBy Caroline Wyatt, religious affairs correspondent, BBC News

The rise in violent anti-Semitic attacks last year in the UK was clearly linked to the conflict in Gaza, with some using criticism of Israel's actions as a pretext for hate speech.

Although the Jewish community is deeply integrated into British society, many British Jews say there has always been a low level of underlying anti-Semitism - such as casual, thoughtless remarks - but the rise of hate speech online is new and risks normalizing such sentiments.

Extremist or hate speech against one minority creates an environment in which such sentiments can easily spread to others. So today's call may also be welcomed by Muslim communities, facing what they say is a rise in Islamophobia following the Paris attacks.

Despite all that, the UK is still seen as one of the most tolerant places in the world to live. MPs, peers and others are keen to ensure that remains the case.

The College of Policing has today published new operational guidance for police officers responding to hate crimes.

The guidance covers law, case studies and the standards that victims and witnesses can expect from officers dealing with this kind of incident. The document replaces the Hate Crime Manual – published in 2005 – and will be incorporated into Authorised Professional Practice (APP) later in the year.

A new national policing hate crime strategy has also been published, which outlines the police service’s commitment to tackling hate crime.

“The Inquiry report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 highlighted the deep damage caused by such targeted violence and its impact on the public’s fear of crime and community cohesion. While the police service has come a long way in our response to hate crime since then, there is still much work to increase confidence in the police service in the communities we serve.

“This guidance and strategy are a comprehensive guide to helping officers at every level in the service to help us respond positively to those crimes that do occur and reduce under-reporting of hate crime. They recognise the emerging challenges we face, such as internet based offences and improving our response to disability hate crime.”

Dr Nathan Hall, from the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies at The University of Portsmouth and member of the Independent Advisory Group for the police service, said:

“The police occupy an important position in protecting victims of hate crime. Victims and broader communities need to have trust and confidence that the police will respond appropriately and effectively to their needs and this further demonstration of their commitment is welcomed. It is also important that many victims and advocates have contributed to the development of this product and I am pleased to see the document published today.

“The policing of hate crime has improved significantly since the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry reported in 1999. This is testament to the tireless efforts of Stephen’s family but also to the dedication of many police officers of all ranks across the country. This guidance will help the service build on those improvements further.”

Reducing the harm caused by hate crimes is a key priority for the police because we know that they have a greater impact on the victim, that they damage communities and can lead to an escalation of harm if they are not dealt with at an early stage. This report shows us that victims of hate crime are significantly more likely to suffer more severe psychological harm when compared to similar, ‘random' crimes.

We share the government’s commitment to increasing the reporting and recording of hate crime and we have been working with partners to increase the transparency and accuracy of data since we agreed a common definition of Monitored Hate Crime in 2007. We welcome this detailed analysis, which will help us to ensure that our services continue to improve and that we work to bring hate crime offenders to justice.

One of the biggest challenges we face is to reduce the under-reporting of hate crime, which is again exposed in this report and I would urge any victim or witness of hate crime to report the matter to the police through True Vision, our online reporting facility (www.report-it.org.uk).

Last week we reported a sharp weekly increase in reports of anti-Muslim Hate Crime reported through True Vision (See the details and caveats to the dat below).

Despite a number of high-profile attacks this week, we have recorded a significant drop in the number of overall reports. From 29th May to 4th June we received 37 reports compared to 136 in the previous 7 days.

The police continue to monitor such attacks at a local and national level in order to reassure communities that we will not tollerate any hate crime.

Facebook announce new approach to Hate Material.

Controversial, Harmful and Hateful Speech on Facebook

From - Facebook Safety (Notes) on Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at 9:51pm

Recently there has been some attention given to Facebook’s content policy. The current concern, voiced by Women, Action and The Media, The Everyday Sexism Project, and the coalition they represent, has focused on content that targets women with images and content that threatens or incites gender-based violence or hate.

Many different groups which have historically faced discrimination in society, including representatives from the Jewish, Muslim, and LGBT communities, have reached out to us in the past to help us understand the threatening nature of content, and we are grateful for the thoughtful and constructive feedback we have received. In light of this recent attention, we want to take this opportunity to explain our philosophy and policies regarding controversial or harmful content, including hate speech, and to explain some of the steps we are taking to reduce the proliferation of content that could create an unsafe environment for users.

Facebook’s mission has always been to make the world more open and connected. We seek to provide a platform where people can share and surface content, messages and ideas freely, while still respecting the rights of others. When people can engage in meaningful conversations and exchanges with their friends, family and communities online, amazingly positive things can happen.

To facilitate this goal, we also work hard to make our platform a safe and respectful place for sharing and connection. This requires us to make difficult decisions and balance concerns about free expression and community respect. We prohibit content deemed to be directly harmful, but allow content that is offensive or controversial. We define harmful content as anything organizing real world violence, theft, or property destruction, or that directly inflicts emotional distress on a specific private individual (e.g. bullying). A list of prohibited categories of content can be found in our Community Standards at http://www.face...munitystandards.

In addition, our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (www.facebook.com/legal/terms) prohibits “hate speech.” While there is no universally accepted definition of hate speech, as a platform we define the term to mean direct and serious attacks on any protected category of people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease. We work hard to remove hate speech quickly, however there are instances of offensive content, including distasteful humor, that are not hate speech according to our definition. In these cases, we work to apply fair, thoughtful, and scalable policies. This approach allows us to continue defending the principles of freedom of self-expression on which Facebook is founded. We’ve also found that posting insensitive or cruel content often results in many more people denouncing it than supporting it on Facebook. That being said, we realize that our defense of freedom of expression should never be interpreted as license to bully, harass, abuse or threaten violence. We are committed to working to ensure that this does not happen within the Facebook community. We believe that the steps outlined below will help us achieve this goal.

We’ve built industry leading technical and human systems to encourage people using Facebook to report violations of our terms and developed sophisticated tools to help our teams evaluate the reports we receive and make or escalate the difficult decisions about whether reported content is controversial, harmful or constitutes hate speech. As a result, we believe we are able to remove the vast majority of content that violates our standards, even as we scale those systems to cover our more than 1 billion users, and even as we seek to protect users from those who seek to circumvent our guidelines by reposting content that has been taken down time and time again.

In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want. In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.

As part of doing better, we will be taking the following steps, that we will begin rolling out immediately:

We will complete our review and update the guidelines that our User Operations team uses to evaluate reports of violations of our Community Standards around hate speech. To ensure that these guidelines reflect best practices, we will solicit feedback from legal experts and others, including representatives of the women's coalition and other groups that have historically faced discrimination.We will update the training for the teams that review and evaluate reports of hateful speech or harmful content on Facebook. To ensure that our training is robust, we will work with legal experts and others, including members of the women’s coalition to identify resources or highlight areas of particular concern for inclusion in the training.We will increase the accountability of the creators of content that does not qualify as actionable hate speech but is cruel or insensitive by insisting that the authors stand behind the content they create. A few months ago we began testing a new requirement that the creator of any content containing cruel and insensitive humor include his or her authentic identity for the content to remain on Facebook. As a result, if an individual decides to publicly share cruel and insensitive content, users can hold the author accountable and directly object to the content. We will continue to develop this policy based on the results so far, which indicate that it is helping create a better environment for Facebook users.We will establish more formal and direct lines of communications with representatives of groups working in this area, including women's groups, to assure expedited treatment of content they believe violate our standards. We have invited representatives of the women Everyday Sexism to join the less formal communication channels Facebook has previously established with other groups.We will encourage the Anti-Defamation League’s Anti-Cyberhate working group and other international working groups that we currently work with on these issues to include representatives of the women’s coalition to identify how to balance considerations of free expression, to undertake research on the effect of online hate speech on the online experiences of members of groups that have historically faced discrimination in society, and to evaluate progress on our collective objectives.These are complicated challenges and raise complex issues. Our recent experience reminds us that we can’t answer them alone. Facebook is strongest when we are engaging with the Facebook community over how best to advance our mission. As we’ve grown to become a global service with more than one billion people, we’re constantly re-evaluating our processes and policies. We’ll also continue to expand our outreach to responsible groups and experts who can help and support us in our efforts to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

- Marne Levine, VP of Global Public Policy

Police record increase in anti-Muslim hate reports.

An ACPO spokesman said:

“In order to increase the reporting of hate crime, the police have a web facility called True Vision (www.report-it.org.uk). The site provides information to victims of hate crime and also allows them to report to a secure online reporting mechanism.

“True Vision has analysed the reports received following the tragic murder of Lee Rigby. In the week following the murder, 136 complaints were identified, including physical offences and internet material . The number of complaints peaked on the day after the murder and have fallen since then.”

For information:

It is not possible to give details about how many of these reports were recorded as crimes and how many were recorded as non-crime incidents because they are recorded by individual forces. Neither is it possible to say how many resulted in arrests.It is known that some reports duplicated the same material. Therefore these figures relate to the number of complaints received, rather than the number of specific incidents.The data does not include offences reported directly to a police force through other reporting mechanisms.The most recent data for 29 May 2013 show four reports of anti-muslim activity.In the week prior to the murder, 27 reports of anti-Muslim activity were identified

The Society of Editors is carrying out research into online moderation in partnership with the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The rise in digital technologies, social networking and media convergence has meant that more and more readers are viewing content online. With an increasing number of newspapers using a digital platform to increase their readership alongside maximising the power of social networking, moderation has never been as important. A rise in the reporting of internet trolls, spamming and online hate crime has meant that media sites have found themselves forced to take a tighter control of what users publish on their websites.

The survey, which has been designed with input and support from the Press Complaints Commission, aims to aid understanding of the new threat of online hate crime through research and enable moderators of media sites to address this. At a local level, the survey will intend to assist local partners to continue to lead on controlling access to harmful and inappropriate content in places such as schools.

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, said: “We hope the survey will make an important contribution to understanding how vulnerable people can be protected without interfering with freedom of expression. The plan is that the survey will help us to produce good practice guidelines.”

Respondents will also be automatically entered into a prize draw to a win a luxury case of wine worth over £50.

Bully for You Video posted to raise awareness of Disability Hate Crime.

A video produced by a Derbyshire based partnership and funded the Victims Fund has been launched on True Vision.

The video which highlights the tragic impact of disability hate crime is intended to raise awareness of the nature of some of the more serious crimes. However it also challenges us all to consider what we can do to reduce the harm such crimes cause.

It has been used as an excellent 'introduction' to training events for professionals.